Camille and Paul Javal (Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli) discuss the state of their decaying relationship in a scene from Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris. The 1963 classic will be one of 200 films to be placed online for French secondary school ciné clubs. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Embassy Pics

It is the question asked by desperate teachers in classrooms all over the world: how do you interest teenagers in high culture and global affairs when all they can think about is romance, rebellion and sex?

In France, they think they may have found the answer: make romance, rebellion and sex part of the average school day.

As part of the government's bid to reconnect the younger generation with the much-cherished Gallic "seventh art", the education minister, Luc Chatel, today unveiled plans for a nationwide film club that will see 200 cinematic classics made available for viewing via an online database.

When the country's secondary schools go back after the summer holiday this year, all will have access to an online catalogue of world films including François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.

It is hoped that viewing Brigitte Bardot cavorting in Le Mépris and John Wayne gun-toting in Rio Bravo will encourage adolescents to further their knowledge of global culture.

"We teach literature, music and theatre at school, and we believe it is essential that cinema be taught as well. It is absolutely vital, even more so because images play such a role in our society and it very important that young people learn to detect and decode images," said Costa Gavras, president of Paris's Cinémathèque.

Last year, while outlining wider reforms of the secondary school, system, Nicolas Sarkozy mooted the idea of a modern equivalent to the "ciné club", saying that France's film heritage was being neglected by young people. "It is vital that we give them the major works of the seventh art as key reference points," he said.

Today, as the first details of the chosen films emerged, the culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said that, in immersing themselves in fictional masterpieces, pupils would be getting to grips with reality as well.

"Works of art are wonderful tools for understanding the world in which we live," he said, singling out Welles's 1941 Oscar-winner as a prime example.

"Citizen Kane … is a remarkable film for understanding the machinations of power, the machinations of ambition. You can compare it with contemporary figures who are ambitious, who want to achieve something and you have an absolutely extraordinary means of understanding them," he said.

The club, which has been created by the education ministry and national broadcasters France Télévisions in consultation with several leading film critics, will be masterminded from the website www.cinelycee.fr. Chatel said it could be used either in conjunction with the core curriculum, such as literature or history lessons, or outside of regular school hours.

He added he hoped it would be a means of combating the inherent imbalance in cultural access in France's schools. Observers point out that while students at elite lycées such as Louis Le Grand in Paris are overwhelmed with artistic options, those in Parisian suburbs or rural areas are less well catered for.

Culture, said Chatel, was an area "where the inequalities are screaming and where school is not playing a sufficient role".